[Q]what version of mysql? what db driver?[/Q]

MySQL 4.1.22-community-nt

[Q]ok, cf6 & above default to utf-8, so that's probably where the "minor"
encoding mismatch is happening (or the db driver). have you tried

<cfset setEncoding("form","iso-8859-1")>

to your application.cfm?[/Q]

yep, no change